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The photo was taken six years ago, when Bartletti was tracking the migrants who traveled on top of railroad cars headed north. It was a depressing ride, and he witnessed many who suffered severed limbs from falling during the course of their dangerous journey. The dark mood lifted when a little boy and girl suddenly appeared.
“It was the only five seconds of joy in the whole three months,” he says. “I was on top of a gasoline tanker going through Chiapas, and out from a coffee plantation came a boy, maybe 8 years old, and his sister, galloping on a horse. They were racing the train, and the migrants began cheering for them.”
A staff photographer at the Los Angeles Times since 1992, Bartletti won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for “Enrique’s Journey,” a series of images that illustrate the desperate struggle of those who must leave their country to survive. He penetrated the lives of Mexican migrants by following Border Patrol agents, who pointed out their hidden trails. He accompanied priests, doctors and social workers into rural work camps. Then he returned alone, hundreds of times, weathering rain and heat, missing family holidays, waiting for the moment when he knew that what he observed would tell a compelling story.
“I’m not looking to make a glamorous, cleverly composed picture,” he says. “I maneuver myself around my subjects until that perspective has relevance. Until things line up.”
More than 90 images in “The Roads Most Traveled: Photographs of Migration by Don Bartletti” are on display at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park from October 1 through January 14. The show, with text in English and Spanish, documents the journeys of men, women and children for the past 20 years. There are pictures of workers trekking from Kenya to Italy, from the Philippines to Japan, from Afghanistan to Pakistan. But the heart and soul of Bartletti’s body of work reflects the harsh realities of those who cross from Latin America to the United States.
North County residents will notice many familiar locations, such as the spot along Interstate 5 and Encinitas Boulevard where Bartletti shot Highway Camp, a picture of three sleeping boys and two men lying outdoors on blankets. Bartletti was walking along the shoulder of the freeway, looking for signs that migrants were camping. When he came across a plastic bag tied to a bush on the side of the road, he knew he had found what he was looking for. He waited for hours until he saw five figures trudge up the hill at dusk.
“I asked them if I could watch them for a while. I told them I was from a big American newspaper and that I had been photographing people like them for many years. I said I wanted to show people how they were living and how hard their life was. They told me they never knew it would be like this.”
Two of the men spoke Spanish; the other three were brothers from Guatemala and spoke only their own dialect. The men said they were surprised by Bartletti’s interest; no one paid attention to them unless they wanted to chase them away or hire them. They wanted him to know that in the life they left behind, they lived in a house and slept in beds. But there was no work.
The real tragedy of migration, Bartletti says, is that many families have broken up. “The problem is in Mexico. People struggle there, and there is never any change. Since the devaluation of the Mexican peso back in August 1982, millions of people have left their country. I’d get out, too.”
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